51–60 of 185 posts
Well, you know what's worse than Manhattan? Miami Beach. That's where SF is headed, if this jingoism keeps up. You can't fight a mass of rich people who want to live in your town: you can only contain them.
Build, baby, build.
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Because they have roots and history in SF and the valley. They've got friends, family, and memories there. It's hard to give up your home. It's those tech upstarts that're causing all the trouble; Moving there en-masse, with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! Really, it's no different from casual racism, but you've got to understand th…
>with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! This is a straw man. It's the "tech upstarts" money and their willingness to spend it like water that's disruptive, and not because it makes them "troublemakers" but because it makes local rents rise to multiples of what they were before. It's very much different than casual racism. edit: it's v…
Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by…
There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.
There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible.
If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.
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I don't think they mean move to a place more affordable out side of SF, but move away from SF to another part of the country.
Where though? At the end we're really talking about arbitrage. Places with jobs are expensive to live in, places that are cheap to live in don't have jobs. There's no way to win, except maybe temporarily exploiting an arbitrage opportunity (i.e., a place with jobs but the cost of living hasn't caught up yet). Expecting people to do this is unreliable at an individual level, and disastrous as public policy. Ultimately…
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What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?
Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?
Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
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Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. There are a lot of issues with this article. It talks about the Ellis act as if it isn't standard in every other part of the country. (in fact, the only thing non-standard is the state of the world pre-ellis act, where landlords in california could never evict people and decide to stop being landlords )
The Ellis Act is kind of fucked up, dude. It's _not_ standard in every other part of the country. It pegs the buyout price of a unit by law, and hasn't been increased in quite a while. Compare to how it works in Brooklyn: If your landlord wants to evict you without cause, they must purchase your lease from you at a price which you can negotiate. It's much more difficult (and can be costlier) to evict you _for_ cause…
Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by…
There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.
Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).
There is a interesting anti-correlation between this and Prop G. Prop G will be a retroactive tax applied to anyone who bought a multi unit building in SF in the last few years who would sell it the next few years. Tenants have no problem pushing this bill stating that buying a building does not entitle you to a lifelong contract and that 'things can change' which will negatively effect you. So even though you bought…
Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by…
Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.
I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely.
"I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..."
That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person.
Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.